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In The Assarts

This is a sequence of sonnets which interrogates the English sonnet tradition by filtering it through a multiplicity of oral registers, from the language of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period to a very contemporary vernacular. An ‘assart’, originally a Medieval word, is a piece of forested land cleared, often illegally, for arable use and I use it as an analogy, pace Bourdieu, for my own ‘clearing’ of the poetic field to make way for these poems. Like an assart, the sonnet is a fiercely guarded form and incursion into its revered properties has often been met with fierce resistance by its gatekeepers. Yet it is a famously malleable form and I wanted to test its boundaries. I thus intentionally distort and defamiliarise it by reorienting and ignoring some of its fabled formal properties such as the volta or ‘turn,’ and the couplet. I use overlong and very short lines to break the historical figuring of the sonnet as a little ‘room’ in which the poet happily imprisons himself along with an often unwilling and silenced female other. I also play with love and desire, the staple content of the traditional sonnet, by destabilising the traditional lyric subject or “I” which is not a singular entity in the poems and is never allowed to address a singular ‘other’ – the poems are deliberately polyamorous. I have also introduced humour as a purposeful means of challenging claims that the sonnet should be a vehicle of poetic agon or suffering. Ultimately with this sequence I want to point to the sonnet as a paradox: in many ways it has long outlived its purpose – another reason for my use of often anachronistic medieval terminology throughout – yet its enduring popularity continues to make it impossible to ignore.